Most people heavily associate Latin America with Spanish, with a dash of Portuguese to account for Brazil. What people don’t think of is English—even though two mainland Latin American countries use English as their official language. One is the South American nation of Guyana, and the other is the small Central American country of Belize nestled in the southeastern corner of the Yucatán Peninsula. Several minority languages, both indigenous and immigrant languages, are spoken throughout the country, but one of the biggest is Belizean Creole, a language unique to Belize.
Native speakers of Belizean Creole, often shortened to just Creole, sometimes written Kriol, number around 150,000, with more than 200,000 people speaking it as a second language. This accounts for the majority of the Belizean population. Even though English is used in formal contexts, Belizean Creole is the lingua franca of the nation, spoken by most people in everyday situations. Translation services for the vernacular are rare, however. We at TranslationServices.com want to address this gap with our new Belizean Creole translation services.
Free quotes for our Belizean Creole translation services are available upon request!
Belizean Creole: Discovering the voice of Belize
Belizean Creole, which has been increasing in prominence in recent years, with increasingly more publications appearing in the language, is an English-based creole language that originated as a contact language between English colonizers and slaves from West Africa. Over time, it developed into a fully fledged language with its own native speakers, graduating from a pidgin to a creole. Other ethnic minorities in Belize, such as the Garifuna, Mestizo, and Maya, adopted the language, some even as a first language. Today, the Belizean government is increasingly promoting the language in education and publications, paving the way for a favorable future for the language.
In many ways, Belizean Creole is highly similar to English, using the same subject-verb-object word order. Much of the vocabulary is derived from English, but smaller grammatical words are often further removed from their English counterparts—take, for example, da, which means “at” or “to,” or pan, which means “on.” Another difference is that Belizean Creole verbs are not conjugated—tense is marked with separate particles before the verb. Marking the past tense is optional, especially when the tense is already obvious thanks to words like “yesterday,” but marking the future tense is obligatory. To navigate all the intricacies of Belizean Creole, you need a native-speaking translator—and we’re proud to say that that’s exactly who we hire.
Our team is passionate about providing Belizean Creole translation services—for any project.
To ensure we’re offering the highest-quality Belizean Creole translation services we can, we’ve carefully selected the top translation talent from all across Belize, hand-picking native-speaking translators representing the various dialects of Belizean Creole. We work with clients looking to translate texts from English to Belizean Creole as well as those seeking translation services from Belizean Creole to English—no matter the direction, our friendly and passionate translators are always eager to help.
We’re pleased to be able to offer Belizean Creole translation services for a wide range of domains—academia, business, literature, and beyond! Our academic translators can cater to clients working in nearly any discipline, whether they’re university researchers or primary school educators. Our business translators are well versed in translating internal company documents and marketing materials for companies in all sorts of industries, even if that entails technical language. Our literary translators are skilled at capturing the subtle nuances and unique writing styles of authors both Belizean and international, translating stories, poems, and other literary works in a variety of genres. We also offer localization services for websites, apps, games, and more—and if you’re looking for anything else, just ask!
Our Belizean Creole translation team is eager to help you. You can get started today by placing a translation order now!